Researching a book a couple of years ago, I spent some time interviewing Indians who had emigrated to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The struggles they faced stayed with me: the father of five, for instance, who lived in a terraced house with fifteen other young men, the residents taking turns to sleep in shifts; the mother of three who had a job in a hospital and helped to run the family corner shop in her “spare” time, rarely getting more than three hours sleep.
The majority of these individuals worked hard so that their children wouldn’t have to and took pleasure in the fact that their offspring, as marketing executives, IT consultants and so on, had better rewarded, less punishing working lives. An unenlightened few, however, decided the difficulty was the making of them, fetishised the suffering and replicated it for their children. It almost never worked out, sometimes tore families apart, and I thought about these unfortunate individuals this week when reading the disparaging remarks City veteran Xavier Rolet uttered about young bankers.
Speaking in the light of well-publicised complaints from a group of first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs that they were working an average of 95 hours per week, sleeping only five hours a night and were at risk of burn-out, the former boss of the London Stock Exchange suggested the trainees on big salaries stop moaning or “do something else”. The 61-year-old, who grew up on a “sink estate” in Paris and made “no apologies for working hard to make it”, added that junior bankers “are paid very well compared to other industries or sectors. Ask a young entrepreneur drawing no salary how they would like to make $100,000-plus straight out of college? Or a single working mum of three working herself to death to put her kids through school?”
Rolet is not the first senior figure in his industry to dismiss the concerns of young bankers, but I hope he is the last, not least because human pain is not relative. Telling a young Goldman Sachs employee that he or she should be grateful because a single mother is suffering more while being paid less achieves nothing whatsoever. By this logic, no one in Britain should ever complain about anything because the situation is so much worse in Yemen. Both the bank trainee and the single mother deserve our sympathy and, where possible, our help.
Second, investment banking is simply not what it was back in Rolet’s day: it’s not growing as quickly as an industry; the margins are much smaller; individuals matter less and can claim less of the credit and glory; and certain technology companies, private equity firms and start-ups are offering similar salaries to attract top talent, with the prospect of a better work-life balance. You’d think an executive of Rolet’s calibre would understand such business trends.
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Third, young people starting their careers in the pandemic are facing pressures Rolet’s generation never did. I elaborated on them at length in this slot a fortnight ago, but, away from the office, they include being treated as nothing more than an email address by colleagues and not being able to develop the relationships that act as compensation for hard work. A first-year analyst at JP Morgan Chase made the point explicitly to The New York Times this year, being quoted in a piece on banker burnout and remarking that while, in an office, workers can commiserate with peers and learn from superiors, stuck at home: “I just send emails constantly and get comments: ‘Please fix this and send it back.’ ”
Finally, millennials and Generation Z simply won’t put up with it. The British and American worlds of work have long understood but not acted upon the truth that long hours are counter-productive: endless studies have found that the exhaustion they inspire ends up making individuals and companies less productive overall. But, finally, we have a generation willing to act upon it. Surveys show that young people in the United States and Britain are more likely than older people to want, and demand, flexibility in their working arrangements.
Indeed, in June City AM reported that up to 70 per cent of analysts and associate teams had left their roles at banks and financial institutions in recent months, “despite firms stepping up their efforts to retain young talent with wage increases and one-off bonuses”. And it is a sign of how deeply banking is in denial about working conditions that it still thinks money is the answer. There have been news reports this week that Goldman Sachs is increasing pay for its junior bankers in response to complaints, when pay is not the point. The insane working hours are the point!
But then investment banking has been in denial about working hours for as long as I can remember. Nothing much happened after a spate of suicides among junior bank employees in 2015. Nothing much happened after a 21-year-old Bank of America intern died of an epileptic seizure after reportedly working for long stretches without sleep in 2013. The industry did little to combat long working hours after a spate of memoirs from bankers implied that extreme working conditions were among the factors, alongside drug and alcohol abuse, that created the dysfunction that led to the financial crisis.
I understand why senior bankers might be resistant to change: it’s human nature to value the system that made you. If hard bloody work didn’t kill you, then hard bloody work won’t kill young people. But, as with the Indian immigrants I interviewed, such nostalgia can sometimes veer into vanity. Just because you suffered and thrived, it doesn’t mean a new generation should and would. Moreover, it’s simply the way of things for youngsters to reject the values of the generation that came before them. Individuals like Rolet should listen to what young people are saying. They might even find that the suggested changes improve their own lives, too.
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Sathnam Sanghera is a journalist and author.
Follow him on Twitter @Sathnam
